Natasha's Story
by WitchyDoctor
Summary: Natalia Romanova wasn't born the Black Widow; she was made. Origin story and maybe a bit more. Rated T, though that could change if the themes gets too dark. - In Progress
1. There Was a Little Girl

_"Older men declare war, but it is the youth that must fight and die_._"_ - Herbert Hoover

Natalia Alianovna Romanova was born in the industrial city of Stalingrad on January 3, 1960. She came screaming into the world just before dawn, in a blocky Soviet hospital on the banks of the Volga River. The winter day was frigid, the wind whipping through streets dusted with grainy snow. Less than a generation before, the Battle of Stalingrad had laid waste to most of the city and killed more than million people. It was one of the most devastating engagements in the history of human warfare and marked the beginning of the end for Hitler's Germany on the Eastern Front. The Allies prevailed, though ideological differences and the passage of time would fracture ties between countries that had, at least in theory, shared a common goal for the duration of the war. After the peace, a modern metropolis rose from the rubble and ashes of the Hero City, becoming an important center for the production steel, oil, chemicals, and ships for the Motherland.

Shortly after the little girl's first birthday, when she was a happy, chubby-faced toddler with strawberry-blonde curls and two adoring parents, the Khrushchev government in Moscow changed the city's name to Volgograd. The Soviet Union, born in blood at the dawn of the 20th century and tempered by war, was turning a corner into a modern era of prosperity. To do so, it must shed the poisonous legacy of Stalin and his Gulag. Sputnik was an example to the world that the country was forward-thinking, even as it built a wall of concrete and wire to bisect the already-divided city of Berlin. That same year, it would put a man into space before the United States. It was by a margin of mere weeks, but that was enough to make another victorious claim of "first". The race for supremacy was well under way.

In the fall of 1964, Nikita Khrushchev was overthrown for Leonid Brezhnev. Under this new leader, who was himself the son of a metalworker, the military proliferated, driven by the logic that it would serve as a deterrent to war. At the same time, culture was increasingly repressed beneath conservative and backward policies. Three-year-old Natalia, whose hair was now a bright coppery shade that stood out against the gray landscape of her home, was eager to start school. From the windows of her parents' small apartment, she watched the other children who lived nearby come and go all winter. She knew her numbers and letters, her colors, and the sounds that animals made, though the only animals she'd seen in real life were cats, dogs and pigeons. The child did _not _know that the young and charismatic president of the United States, who had come to Berlin to decry the building of the wall by her country, had been assassinated on a street in Dallas nearly a year before. Neither did she know that missiles on an island named Cuba had brought the Eagle and the Bear to the brink of mutually assured destruction, or that there was an escalating conflict in a faraway country called Vietnam. The stories her daddy told her when he came home from his factory job were full of fairies and snow maidens, not monsters.

The fire that killed three American astronauts in January of 1967 was widely propagandized in the Soviet Union, presented to its citizens as evidence of the superiority of the Soviet system. Yuri Gagarin in was an international celebrity and a Hero of the Soviet Union, the handsome dream of many young girls, at least until his sudden death in 1968. The next year, Apollo 11 and Neil Armstrong's "small step for man" catapulted the United States to the forefront of the space race. Young Natalia walked the streets of Volgograd to school and back, wearing a bulky hand-me-down coat and a green wool cap. Before it had been a sweater of her father's, but her mother had unraveled the old garment and knitted the hat just for Natalia. Each morning, her unruly mass of hair was temporarily tamed into two long braids that hung down her back, so as not to distract her from her schoolwork. She had a white blouse and plain pinafore like all the other girls, with itchy wool stockings. Sitting in her wooden desk, her feet didn't touch the floor. Across the Atlantic ocean, children in American schools practiced ducking under their desks and covering their heads, in case the Russian bogeyman decided to attack. That was an image that never entered the girl's head as she bent it over her schoolwork, doing sums and printing neat answers on the clean, white page.

When she was eight years old, a fire that happened much closer to home completely reshaped Natalia's small, secure world. Once she started going to school, her mother got a job at the same factory where her father worked. Even so, when she returned home in the afternoon, eager to share the news of her day, her mother was always there with a smile and a snack. One day, when winter snows finally seemed to be giving way to spring, there was a man in a dark suit sitting at her kitchen table instead of her mother. He introduced himself as her Uncle Ivan, though she had never seen him before that she could remember. His warm brown eyes had looked very sad when he bent down to tell her that her parents had been killed by a fire at the factory. Because of that, she must come to live with him in a big house with many other girls. She didn't want to leave the small apartment, the only home she had ever known. The bedspread her mother had sewed covered her narrow cot and her drawings were hung on the walls; this was the place where her mother baked such good bread and daddy made her laugh. In the end, she had no choice. They didn't take anything from her meager collection of toys or books, nor any of her clothes - only what she had on her back. When they got where they were going, even those few items were stripped from her, including her green hat...


	2. The Red Room

_"The Cold War isn't thawing; it is burning with a deadly heat. Communism isn't sleeping; it is, as always, plotting, scheming, working, fighting."_ - Richard M. Nixon

Nearly two decades before Natalia was born, Captain America captured the imaginations of fearful and war-weary people across America. The collective genius of Abraham Erskine and Howard Stark had made the super-soldier dream a reality; sabotage by Germany's HYDRA prevented it from materializing into a full-fledged army. Although the Soviets were allies with the United States, the super-soldier knowledge was not shared with them. They could see with their own eyes the power of the "Star Spangled Man" as he rallied and led ordinary men into battle. Stalin believed what was good for the red, white, and blue would be even better for the Red. Soviet efforts were futile until the capture of Berlin in April of 1945. In the _Führerbunker _that contained the body of the Nazi leader and in the SS-_Hauptamt_, they found files detailing the experimentations of Nazi doctors and scientists in many arenas. Several HYDRA elements had gone rogue by the end of the war and the rest had been destroyed by Captain America, but the extensive paper trail of the SS made sure their work was preserved. With the Captain dead as well, at least as far as anyone knew, the Soviets were in a position to achieve ascendancy.

In the beginning, the Red Room Academy was a lot like Natalia's first school. She loved it. She missed her parents, of course, especially her mother's soft smiles and her daddy's big bear hugs, but she quickly discovered that crying was frowned upon. No one hugged her in this place, but if she worked hard enough and did everything she was told, then she was praised by Uncle Ivan and the teachers. Some of the girls weren't as good as she was. They misbehaved or couldn't do their lessons correctly. A few went away, one or two at a time, leaving behind stripped and empty cots among the two long rows in the large dormitory. She tried not to look at them as she got into her own bed and pulled the covers high up around her ears. The older girls told whispered stories about the bad things that happened to girls who had to leave, shushing when the old lady who watched over them at night came in to make sure they were asleep. The blankets here were warm and there was plenty of food. They served sweet fruit pudding with dinner every day, and pudding was her favorite. She was always very sleepy at night, sleepier than she ever remembered being in the old apartment. Maybe it was because she was learning so much. She would be a good girl and the _best _student so she would not disappoint Uncle Ivan... so no one would send her away, too.

The sixties became the seventies, and the world outside the Red Room continued to change. A series of economic measures that came to be called "Nixon Shock" ended the existing system of international monetary exchange. The world would later watch Nixon resign in the shadow of the Watergate scandal. Palestinian terrorists murdered eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. The next year, Egypt launched a surprise attack on Israel. Later the two countries would sign a historic treaty after their leaders met for secret negotiations with Jimmy Carter at Camp David. Saigon fell, and with it died the last American hopes in Vietnam. The whole world craved oil, and many countries found that they could not get what they needed as Arab nations flexed their newfound political muscles. Apollo 17 would mark the last time a man set foot on the moon, though the Soviet Union was making strides in space stations, beginning with Salyut 1. With the rest of her nation, Natalia mourned the three cosmonauts who died in 1971, but this occupied little of her attention. At age eleven, she still had much to learn to be useful to her country, as those brave men had been.

Natalia was also not aware of two very different boys who were born in the United States the same year the cosmonauts died. These boys would be orphaned as she had been, and both would one day make profound impacts on her life. She could have picked out Tony Stark's New York birthplace on a map, since she had memorized the most important geography of the Soviet Union's greatest rival, but the small town of Waverly, Iowa had no significance in her world. With a single-minded determination she had surpassed all the other students at the Red Room, including girls who were years older than her. She still loved school, and had also come to enjoy the extreme physical demands placed upon her. As she grew taller and her body developed into that of an adult woman, she adapted with lithe grace. At twelve she was coltish and angular, strong for her age, but looking like she was all skinny arms and legs. By fourteen her gangly lines had become generous curves, accented by pouty lips and dark-lashed turquoise eyes that made even happily married men stop and look twice. She wouldn't be much older when she learned exactly what those looks meant.

It was only the required visits to the doctors that Natalia didn't like. She wasn't sick; she _never _got sick. That didn't seem to matter. At least once each week she had to strip completely naked and put an itchy, crackly paper gown over her goose-bumped skin. Then she had to wait on an exam table in a room with pea-green ceramic tiles on the walls, a beige linoleum floor with a drain in the center, and stainless steel counters. In that ugly room she would be weighed and measured, poked and prodded, given shots or "treatments" that left her feeling strange: sleepy or sick to her stomach or like she was floating on a hazy pink cloud. The doctors wore white smocks with matching white aprons, caps, and masks, and always rubber gloves covering their hands. They never introduced themselves to her, but it seemed to be the same set all the time, so she made up nicknames based on the few distinguishing features she could see: a pair of round, wire-frame glasses; thick black eyebrows like twin caterpillars; a dark birthmark high on one cheek; freckles dotting the bridge of a slender nose. That made the impersonal manipulations and invasions of her body somewhat more bearable, even when they spoke about her like she wasn't there...


End file.
